China is emerging as a fierce competitor to the US in the race to build small modular reactors and fusion that can help power data centers.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51898350

https://archive.is/WW6ji

Their fusion and fission work is very impressive,” the Microsoft Corp. co-founder said of China’s nuclear innovation efforts. The country is investing more in fusion “than the rest of the world put together, times two

  • solo@slrpnk.net
    1·
    4 hours ago

    • If I got this right, from in table 1, p3 one could get to the conclusion that to decommission photovoltaics creates 7 times more CO2 (more precisely g CO2e/kWh), than decommissionning a nuclear plant for decades, as shown above. It made me wonder how they arrived to these measurements. But the link to the study for the nuclear is dead (see Heath, Garvin A., and Margaret K. Mann. 2012). So this cannot be verified.

    • Having a solution in the works, is very different from what you said, which was: Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem.

    Bye-bye now

    • turdas@suppo.fi
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Nuclear is incredibly energy dense and reactors have a very long lifespan, so it makes sense that decommissioning it would be cheaper than solar panels. For example the 1.6 GW reactor in Finland has an operational lifespan of at least 60 years, whereas solar panels currently last 20-30 years. Given that they last half the time and that a 1.6 GW solar installation would be absolutely massive (something like 40 km²), it stands to reason that solar would create more CO2e/kWh to decommission.